Cubbies!

Atlas Obscura has a pretty great piece on the Chicago Cubs following in Belize. It’s all WGN! I remember when I was young the Chicago Cubs and Atlanta Braves were fixtures in our household, despite not being the local teams. Being on WGN and TBS meant that you could watch them every day for free. The more local teams cost extra. That was back when baseball games and things to do generally were a scarcity. When “I had nothing to do, but there was a team from a far-away city playing baseball on television so I might as well watch it” was a statement that made sense.

Post navigation

7 thoughts on “Cubbies!”

Also before baseball teams figured out that having home games on TV is good marketing for the team. Around here, every away Giants-Dodgers game was televised, but no home games, presumably because people might watch the game at home and then bathe in ice water as a cheaper substitute for the full Candlestick experience.

The NFL blackout policy makes it clear that they’re still clueless on the subject. How do you build a fanbase for a struggling team? Don’t let people anywhere near them!

The NFL has shelved their blackout policy for the last couple of years, and was deliberately lax about it for almost a decade before that.

The biggest change in baseball is that in most markets, you can watch just about every game, but you need a cable or satellite service. OTA (and usually UHF) broadcasts are a fraction of what they used to be in frequency, it seems to me.

Cubs fans are a tough crowd. Years back I went to a AAA game in Denver when the Cubs affiliate was playing. After one of the Cubs’ players made a dumb base-running mistake and got caught in a run-down between second and third, a guy in a Cubs t-shirt sitting a couple of rows in front of us jumped up on his seat and screamed, “And that’s why you’re still in triple-A!!”

Growing up in Louisville you got to pick whatever team you wanted, though we’re certainly tilted towards the Reds, having been longtime AAA affiliates. I chose the Cubs and it’s been a lesson in loyalty.

Tonight might be a bitter pill to swallow, but I will say that it’s hard to imagine another following that has such bad luck and still fills seats. I suppose Notre Dame fans count, of which I also belong. I’ll still take it.

So the Cubs won at Wrigley last night…which was tear-jerking and goosebump-inducing and pretty much amazing. Winning the series is a tough task (2 in-a-row at Cleveland) but if we don’t do it this year, I can say that I will remember singing ‘Go Cubs Go’ after the game for the rest of my life.